Machinery

“It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room.”
(Out of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into several remote nations of the world. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships . . ., London, 1726)

One degree morning. Thinking machine’s lubricant nigh-solidified. One obvious point de repère. Williams, The Wedge (1944):

To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.
      Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

There’s Williams, too, “An Approach to the Poem” (1947), refining the note: “. . . it is a small (or large) mechanism or engine, as Saintsbury said, composed of words to do a certain job.” And adding, “as a forewarning”:

. . . it is an engine that needs continual redesigning in each period of the world so as to increase its capacity in order to refresh the world (if possible) in each period by conceiving the world anew . . .

(Hard to figure exactly what particular, if any, Saintsbury reference Williams is recalling. In a 20 June 1947 letter to Kenneth Burke, prior to attending a writers’ conference in Salt Lake City, Williams reported “reading Saintsbury’s Manual of English Prosody in preparation for bouts with [Allan] Tate who will be also at Utah—so’s not to be caught with my pants too far down on technical matters.” Saintsbury’s usage of “engine” seems mostly to mean “device”: “certainly that powerful and dangerous engine, the pause, comes into play here,” “Pope’s other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology,” &c.)

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Machined. That ongoing reverie of some “Contrivance” by means of which “the most ignorant Person . . . with a little bodily Labour, might write Books in Philosophy, Poetry . . . without the least Assistance from Genius or Study . . .” Donc, Jonathan Swift’s writing machine in Gulliver’s Travels:

It was Twenty Foot square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order.

Operated: “Pupils . . . took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed . . . Six and Thirty of the Lads . . . read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes . . .”

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Pound, out of “Machine Art” (1927-1930):

The Form

      The necessity is to keep one’s different ideas from barging into each other.
      In looking at any machine one must sort out the essential parts from the parts that merely happen to be there and which keep an assemblage of machines in more or less fortuitous relation to each other. . . .

Objections to Machines

      Objection to machines has probably disappeared from all, save a few belated crania. No machine ever interfered with a man’s personality or damaged his liberty. Machines were made to eliminate work and produce leisure. Overcrowding, bad placing, bad ventilation of work rooms, all these results of greed and ineradicable human stupidity may have done harm, but can not be blamed on the machine. Machine products have been ugly but even the parochial aesthetic knows by now that this is due to human stupidity and not to machines; the same result has occurred in handwork, painting, music, whenever the worker or artist has gone in for flummydiddle instead of proportion.

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Beckett, out of Molloy (French, 1951 / English, 1955):

. . . I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? . . . It was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen . . .

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Gunk in the gearing. Williams (“An Approach to the Poem”):

When the form has been completed, when it has at last flowered, it begins at once to become sclerotic and has to be broken down once more to the elements—elements, as when English first differed from Latin and Greek, as when Italian grew from Latin and Dante adopted it . . . The elements were new—opening new realms of feeling unknown to the earlier languages.
      Everything has to be broken down, not cynically, not without a deep sense of its old dignity, to get at the essential: the formal unit in its purity (that has been tied into now partially meaningless configurations by old languages) . . .